How: You are basically pitching your yeast into a small batch of weak unhopped wort to allow the growth phase to increase your cell count for a day or two. I prefer to pressure can starter, but that's just because I'm too lazy to boil a new one every time.

Why: 1. Achieve proper pitching rate for the best possible outcome for your beer. This is especially important for lagers and high gravity ales.2. Lower lag time. Pitching an active yeast starter will promote a faster active fermentation in your batch of beer than pitching directly from vial or packet.3. Test viability of older yeast. If you get no activity, you know the yeast is bad before you waste time with a full batch of beer.

We meet every 2nd Tuesday of the month. Our next meeting is on 6/9 at 7pm, at Stein Fillers. Feel free to drop in and check out the meeting if you are free.

Thanks a bunch! That's two days from now, I'll see if I can stop by.

Quick question, what is the point system all about that's listed on the club site?

In order to encourage people to brew the style of the month, we have designated 5 months as "Homebrewer of the Month" competition months. It's just for fun and bragging rights. This Tuesday is one of those months, with the style being "fruit beer".

As such, members who want to enter will bring in a fruit beer, which will be blind poured to everyone at the meeting. After all of the competition beers are poured and tasted, a popular vote will be held to pick the top 3 to award points. 5 points for 1st, 4 for 2nd, 3 for 3rd, and 1 for entering a beer. At the end of the 5 months, the club member with the most points is crowned homebrewer of the year and has their name put on trophy with past winners. After voting is complete, the brewers are announced and the top 2 or 3 brewers talk briefly about their beers and answer any questions people have.

I always learn something by entering and blind tasting my beer. It's interesting how my perception changes when I don't know which beer is mine. This month may not be good for that as Fruit Beer is pretty broad. If someone has, say, a peach blonde, it may be the only peach blonde. This works better when the style is more focused, like "milk stout" or something.

In addition to this little popular vote comp, members will bring in other beers to share and speak about as well.

I looked at the Windows phone during my last upgrade. The lack of adoption leaves it lacking in the app department, which hinders future adoption. I don't know how they break out of that cycle... but in the meantime, Drew is right. There probably are not enough users to warrant bothering.